Surrey’s supervised injection site will open this week

SURREY (NEWS 1130) – This Thursday, the first-ever supervised injection site will open its doors in Surrey to help curb the city’s mounting overdose deaths.

Seven booths and medical staff will be available daily from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. The facility sits on 135A Street, adjacent to the Gateway Shelter and the SHOP Clinic.

Karen Scott is a recovering heroin user who did most of her drugs alone at home. She’s happy the centre is opening. “Because if you’re living alone, you can’t get to the phone if you’ve overdosed. You can’t grab Naloxone. You can’t bring yourself back, so that’s why there are so many in-home deaths.”

SafePoint will be the province’s first such site outside of Vancouver that allows people to shoot up drugs under medical supervision while they are linked up with other health and social services.

A similar service will be incorporated into an existing clinic later this month in Surrey, which has had the second-highest number of overdose fatalities in the province after Vancouver.

SafePoint comes 14 years after the ground-breaking start of Insite, the supervised injection site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which was launched to prevent the spread of HIV.

Fraser Health Chief Medical Health Officer Dr. Victoria Lee says she’s disappointed Health Canada did not approve the site to allow people to also snort drugs or take them orally. She adds the agency is still considering that possibility. “It’s been a long journey but we couldn’t have accomplished what we have, in terms of opening this site this week, without many of the partners that are here with us here today.”

Meantime, the agency has announced 2,458 Canadians died last year, almost seven people per day, adding Western Canada is being hit the hardest by the crisis.

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